Nitz

“He’d get in these sloppy moods of giving me life advice, like I was his real son. Which, even if beggars can’t be choosers, would not have been my first choice. He always ended up saying the same thing: If you spend one penny less than you earn every month, you’ll be happy. But spend a penny more than you earn, you’re done for. He’d look at me with those dark, sad eyes and lay this on me. That the secret of happiness basically is two cents.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead

“While the mechanistic understanding of the cancer cell remained suspended in limbo between viruses and chromosomes, a revolution in the understanding of normal cells was sweeping through biology in the early twentieth century. The seeds of this revolution were planted by a retiring, nearsighted monk in an isolated abbey in Brno, Austria, who bred pea plants as a hobby. In the early 1860s, working alone, Gregor Mendel had identified a few characteristics in his purebred plants that were inherited from one generation to the next—the color of the pea flower, the texture of the pea seed, the height of the pea plant.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“Nobody rides you like you ride yourself, they say. But we get more than our share of help. These people and vegetarians and so forth that are all about being fair to the races and the gays, I am down with that. I agree. But would it cross any mind to be fair to us? No, it would not. How do I know? TV. The comedy channel is so funny it can make you want to go unlock the gun cabinet and kill yourself. Do they really think that along with being brainless and having sex with animals, we don’t even have cable? There’s this thing that happens, let’s say at school where a bunch of guys are in the bathroom, at the urinal, laughing about some dork that made an anus of himself in gym. You’re all basically nice guys, right? You know right from wrong, and would not in a million years be brutal to the poor guy’s face. And then it happens: the dork was in the shitter. He comes out of the stall with this look. He heard everything. And you realize you’re not really that nice of a guy. This is what I would say if I could, to all smart people of the world with their dumb hillbilly jokes: We are right here in the stall. We can actually hear you.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead

“For the kids who wake up hungry in those dark places every day, who’ve lost their families to poverty and pain pills, whose caseworkers keep losing their files, who feel invisible, or wish they were: this book is for you.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead